Political conservatism has been characterized by resistance to change and acceptance of inequality, with liberalism characterized by the polar opposite of these values. Political attitudes are heritable and may be influenced by basic personality traits. In previous research, conservatism (vs. liberalism) has been associated positively with Conscientiousness and negatively with Openness-Intellec...

Using World Values Survey data on seven European democracies, we explore how authoritarian attitudes often associated with Radical Right party support are related to both individual-level and macro-level influences. We find that socio-demographic variables, such as age, education and social class, have similar effects across countries. Nonetheless, even after controlling for these socio-demogra...

The rigidity of the right model posits that psychological needs for security and certainty (NSC) attract people to a broad right-wing ideology that includes both sociocultural and economic political attitudes. We review evidence that NSC characteristics do not consistently predict economically right-wing preferences and propose the Menu-Independent and -Dependent Influence (MIDI) model as an al...

Studies have largely examined the association between political ideology and health at the aggregate/ecological level. Using individual-level data from 29 European countries, we investigated whether self-reports of political ideology and health are associated. In adjusted models, we found an inverse association between political ideology and self-rated poor health; for a unit increase in the po...

There is scant evidence that incidental cues in the environment significantly alter people's political judgments and behavior in a durable way. We report that a brief exposure to the American flag led to a shift toward Republican beliefs, attitudes, and voting behavior among both Republican and Democratic participants, despite their overwhelming belief that exposure to the flag would not influe...

1. The State of Framing Research in Political Communication ............................................................................................................................................ The concept of framing embodies a context-sensitive explanation for shifts in political beliefs and attitudes. Framing defines a dynamic, circumstantially-bound process of opinion formation in whi...

Debates over wolf policy are driven by an underlying attitudinal divide between people from urban and rural areas. This study explores how the power relationship between urban and rural groups interact with individual attitude formation in relation to wolf policy, in order to understand why dissatisfaction with wolf policy tends to result in group level conflict patterns. Using Swedish survey d...

Do print media significantly impact political attitudes and party identification? To examine this question, we draw on a rare quasi-natural experiment that occurred when The Sun, a right-leaning UK tabloid, shifted its support to the Labour party in 1997 and back to the Conservative party in 2010. We compared changes in party identification and political attitudes among Sun readers with non-rea...

This study assesses the relationship between political partisanship and attitudes and behavior with respect to the H1N1 virus (swine flu) crisis of 2009 in general, and the U.S. mass vaccination program in particular. I argue that even seemingly nonpartisan political issues like public health are increasingly characterized by partisan polarization in public attitudes and that such polarization ...

The dramatic increase in the U.S. Latino population in recent decades has spurred an equally dramatic rise in bilingual survey instruments used by scholars to gauge the political attitudes of this growing ethnic group. A key assumption behind these instruments is that English-language items tap the same political constructs as their Spanish-language analogs. This paper reports evidence which su...